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Review of Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries: The case of Greek and Turkish

OVERVIEWAccording to DuFon et al. (1994), in the western tradition, theearliest book on politeness is Libro del cortegiano [Englishtranslation: The book of the courtier. Harmondsworth: Penguin] byCastiglioner Baldesar in 1528 (cf. Xie, in preparation a). It isGoffman's (1967), Lakoff's (1973), Grice's (1975), Leech's (1983) andBrown and Levinson's (1978, 1987) now-seminal work that has all madesignificant contributions to helping this very subject enjoy ever-increasing popularity with students of linguistics and language use(cf. e.g., Kasper 1990; Sifianou 1992: 1). Recent years have witnesseda geometric, or in Chen's (2001: 87) words, 'mammoth- like' increase inthe number of publications dealing with politeness phenomena.Politeness has, undoubtedly, grown into a major topic of concern in theacademic domains of pragmatics, anthropology, sociolinguistics,culture, communication, discourse analysis and even cognition, wherenine out of ten publications or presentations (e.g., Escandell-Vidal1996; Foley 1997; Grundy 2000; Johnstone 2002; Wardhaugh 1998; Xie2000; Zhuang 2001) discuss more or less this very line of inquiry. Someresearchers (e.g., House 1998; Sell 1991) have even expanded the scopeof politeness by examining it within the framework of translation andliterature.

The present volume under review, which is a collection of papers inreality, endeavors to fill a fraction of a gap brought about by limitedknowledge despite "the time that has elapsed and the considerablenumber of publications that have appeared concerning the complex issueof politeness and its realizations" (p. 1; cf. Ide 1989: 97). Thisvolume is special and unique indeed, in comparison with other recentpublications on politeness (e.g., Lee-Wong 2000; Marquez Reiter 2000;cf. Pérez-Parent 2001; Yus 2001; Xie inpreparation b), in that all thepapers collected in this volume are devoted to politeness phenomena atthe cultural intersections of Europe, Asia and the Middle East (cf. p.xii; p. 1). According to the editors, this volume has at least threepurposes to achieve. First, it serves to draw our attention topoliteness phenomena in areas other than English, which has hithertobeen the playground of theory-makers; second, it makes available toobservers regional patterns of behavior, which are located between theEast and the West; and third, it demonstrates the results of culturalinteraction, even when the interaction is in the past (p. 7). All thepapers, arranged in pairs, are devoted to expounding realizations ofpoliteness in relation to social parameters. After all, politeness isat once a language phenomenon and a social phenomenon. My criticalevaluations will be inserted into each chapter reviewed, and I attemptto make a comparison with the Chinese context where it is appropriateand necessary.

The first two chapters in this volume present a more generalethnographic picture of the two societies. The first chaptercontributed by Renee Hirschon, is entitled "Freedom, solidarity andobligation: The socio-cultural context of Greek politeness" (pp. 17-42), which focuses on some aspects of Greek politeness behavior in thecontext of social norms and cultural values, and the indigenous Greekemphasis on freedom in particular. Adopting an anthropologicalapproach, Hirschon contends that verbal expressions are interpretive inan overall cultural context and in relation to prevalent values (cf. p.18). The concept of "face" is seen here as a cognate concept, theequivalent of "honor", a key notion for the interpretation of Greeksocial conduct and values in the anthropological approach. It isgenerally agreed that the study of politeness is closely linked to thenotion of "face", however, this is not to say that the study ofpoliteness is equal to that of "face" (cf. Mao 1994). Besides, althoughthe study of "face" owes much to Goffman (1955, 1967; cf. p. 19;Terkourafi 1999), it is as early as in 1944 that Hu Shien Chin, aChinese anthropologist, introduced the notion of "face" to the west forthe first time (cf. Scollon and Scollon 1995: 34).

Hirschon argues that politeness codes have a direct bearing on notionsof honor and reputation (cf. p. 20), which is, to some extent, true ofthe Chinese case and that identifying the primary value of freedom andpersonal autonomy helps to make sense of some cultural features and oflanguage use. An important and insightful point made by Hirschon isthat "face" or self-esteem is not entirely determined by literalexpression of an utterance, because words themselves have a "facevalue" (cf. p. 35). It is also pointed out by the author that verbalaccountability is lax in Greek linguistic behavior.

In "Politeness in Turkish and its linguistic manifestations: A socio-cultural perspective" (pp. 43-74), Deniz Zeyrek examines the influenceof socio-cultural phenomena on language. Viewing politeness as animportant aspect of socio- culturally sanctioned behavior, Zeyrekanalyzes its manifestations in the vocabulary, formulaic expressionsand conversational styles. The Turkish society is one of collectivism,and family and the country are top of the list for almost all Turks (p.44). Individuals are expected to place group advantages before personalones, which actually determines the type of appropriate behavior inlinguistic communication. And some utterances concerning privacy like"Are you married?" or "Why aren't you married?" put to a newacquaintance are deemed appropriate and as a means of establishingrelationships instead of intrusive. And insistence on making offers areshown to be "a way of showing cordiality" (p. 53) and intrinsicallypolite rather than a downright imposition as generally understood byother cultures.

The following pair deals with the variables of power and status inclassroom and other interaction, and. In "Linguistics of power andpoliteness in Turkish: Revelations from speech acts" (pp. 75-104),Seran Dogancay-Aktuna and Sibel Kamisli try to provide answers for thefollowing questions:

i. What is the preferred mode of speech behavior of native speakers ofTurkish in disagreeing with and correcting an unequal statusinterlocutor?ii. What type of politeness markers do Turks utilize to soften theeffect of potential FTAs?iii. What is the effect of social status and context on choice ofpoliteness markers by Turkish speakers?

According to the findings, in giving corrections in the classroom,professors are significantly more direct than higher status bossesdisagreeing with their assistants. Besides, professors do not feel theneed to be indirect in giving corrections, whereas in the workplace,considerations of the face-needs of the others are more expected (p.83). In the Chinese context, however, even the professor feel the needto take into account the negative politeness of his/her student when itcomes to giving corrections.

In "Politeness in the classroom?: Evidence from a Greek high school"(pp. 105-136), Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou aims to give an intra-culturalaccount of politeness in an institutionalized context, and morespecifically in the classroom. The author shows that students tend toneglect their teacher's positive face wants, while teachers seem tocare less for their students' negative face and put a greater emphasison the positive face wants of their students. Pavlidou argues that theclassroom interaction under discussion is characterized by minimalpoliteness investments, especially on the students' part, a fact thatcan be explained in terms of roles of students and teachers in theclassroom, the type of speech activity that is expected of each and thegroup presence of students and the solo appearance of the teachers. Andthe author is right in concluding that one needs to "make a much moresystematic intra-cultural examination of contextual aspects in thestudy of politeness" (p. 131) before talking about inter-culturaldifferences in politeness.

The next pair focuses on variables of solidarity in advice giving andin the use of approbatory expressions. In "Congratulations and bravo!"(pp. 137-176), Marianthi Makri-Tsilipakou investigates two relatedapprobatory expressions used in everyday interpersonal communicationbetween Greeks, i.e. "congratulations" and "bravo". As observed by theauthor, "bravo" in Greek seems to be more of an exclamation than"congratulations"; "congratulations", part of a more formal register,seems to presuppose some culturally recognized event or ceremony and ismore of a conventional expression than "bravo" (cf. 138-149). Moreover,real language data have shown that neither of the two approbatoryexpressions can be associated exclusively with the illocutionary forcesthey were initially matched with, and "bravo" sometimes ends up self-directed while "congratulations" is strictly other- directed. Theauthor concludes that both expressions are driven by the positivepolite concern for involvement.

In "Advice-giving in Turkish: 'Superiority' or 'solidarity'" (pp. 177-208), Arin Bayraktaroglu, one of the two editors of this volume,demonstrates the differences existing between American/British Englishand Turkish through case studies in regard to the speech act of advice-giving. Advice-giving is said to be highly face-threatening in Westernculture, where negative politeness is usually the norm (cf. e.g., Brown& Levinson 1978, 1987; Leech 1983; Wardhaugh 1985). However, it iswidely employed in Turkish to underline and consolidate solidarity.According to the author, not all trouble-talk sequences incorporate anadvice turn, nor does advice always appear after the mention of apersonal problem, but the occurrence of the two in the same stretch oftalk is fairly common (p. 188; cf. pp. 188-192). Besides, socialdistance between the speakers seems to plays a decisive role concerningthe sequential development after advice-taking (p. 193; cf. pp. 194-203). Unsolicited advice shows some variation in the sense thatsocially distant partners produce advice turns heavily marked withhesitation, while intimate speakers alternate between crude andmitigated utterances. All these observations are explained in terms ofcollectivism within which Turkish society falls, and they, as thepresent reviewer sees it, need to be further evidenced.

The next pair concentrates on service encounters and the differentialuse of language by males and females. In "The use of pronouns and termsof address in Turkish service encounters" (pp. 209-240), YaseminBayyurt and Arin Bayraktaroglu look at two aspects of nominal andpronominal use as is exhibited in Turkish service encounters. Oneaspect is the variation affected by the economic prestige attached tothe setting, as well as the familiarity between the interlocutors. Theother aspect is concerning gender differences. The authors find thatmale customers are influenced by the economic affluence of the settingmore than the females and that they are more at ease to switch to thesolidarity forms in shops of frequent use than the female counterparts.And this can find also some expression in the Chinese context.

Brief service encounters involve mainly requests besides optionalgreetings and leave- takings. In "Brief service encounters: Gender andpoliteness" (pp. 241-269), Eleni Antonopoulou touches upon genderedlinguistic behavior in Greek service encounters. As observed by theauthor from exchanges between 380 customers and a couple running asmall shop. According to the author, both men and women, on the whole,show a preference for positive politeness devices, selecting, however,different ones, probably functioning on the basis of distinctinternalized stereotypes of expected behavior (p. 242). The authorfinds, among others, that the whole exchange can be performed insilence (cf. pp. 246-247), though it is the least frequent in the dataexamined. However, such a finding would find little support from theChinese context. It is incredible that requests in service encountersshould be dealt with in dead silence, even though the customer and theowner of a shop are very familiar with each other. Moreover, remainingsilent is not necessarily "the utmost expression of politeness" (Brownand Levinson 1987: 72); rather, it could be regarded as a high degreeof impoliteness. And instances of elliptical requests observed in thedata examined can also be found in Chinese service encounters.

The following pair is devoted to investigating the use of interruptionsin television talk. In " 'What you're saying sounds very nice and I'mdelighted to hear it': Some considerations on the functions ofpresenter-initiated simultaneous speech in Greek panel discussions"(pp. 271-306), drawing on Goldberg's (1990) classification ofsimultaneities into "power-related", "rapport-related" and "neutral",Angeliki Tzanne examines 5 hourly all-male panel discussions aiming toidentify the functions of presenter-initiated simultaneous speech.According the author, simultaneous speech relates to the presenters'intention to control the direction and the substance of the discourse.Besides, the supportive simultaneities under examination are closelyrelated to the positive politeness orientation of the Greek people,that is, to their preference for cultivating the positive aspect offace of their interlocutors.

In "Analysis of the use of politeness maxims in interruptions inTurkish political debates" (pp. 307-340), Alev Yemenici examines twomajor categories of interruptions made during political interviews:interviewer interruptions on interviewee talk and intervieweeinterruptions on interviewee talk. According to the author,interviewers tend to make news interviews full of heated debates inmultiparty interviews to capture the audience and to increase viewing;interviewees, especially politicians, on the other hand, are anxious toget more votes and to appeal to both their own voters and potentialvoters. Thus, interviewers and interviewees use interruptions as astrategy to achieving their aims. And some interviewer interruptions oninterviewee talk are found to be convivial and polite especially wheninterviewers employ politeness strategies such as mitigation andapologies for interruption. As the present reviewer sees it, thepresent study would be better if it took into account genderdifferences in interruptions. Under the Chinese context, which ischaracteristic of masculinity, the chances are that male intervieweesinterrupt more than female ones. More often than not, femaleinterviewees seem to remain silent until asked to take the floor.

The last, but not the least pair tackles compliments in interaction.Relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) claimsutterance comprehension and interpretation is a cognitive process,which costs some mental effort and achieves some cognitive effect. Ithas now grown into a much-researched topic and some people (e.g.,Escandell Vidal 1995, 1996, 1998; Jary 1998) have attempted to accountfor politeness from the relevance-theoretic perspective. However,relevance theory does not make any claims as to whether polite orimpolite behavior is more likely (cf. Jucker 1988). In "Relevancetheory and compliments as phatic communication: The case of Turkish"(pp. 341-390), Sukriye Ruhi and Gurkan Dogan tries to bring a newdimension to the cognitive approach to politeness by linking the socialaspects of compliments to relevance theory (p. 12). Complimenting isidentified here as a form of phatic communication that may contributeto creating/maintaining a positive mutual cognitive environment betweenthe complimenter and the complimentee (p. 359). As observed by theauthors, most compliments in Turkish are formulaic and mainly occurs inclose relationship to emphasize in-group solidarity. As far as genderand complimenting are concerned, the authors find that men complimentwomen more and that women compliment other women more than they do men(cf. pp. 366-377). The authors are right in arguing that thepropositional content of utterances for complimenting is of minorimportance. It is what is implied in the utterance that counts.

In the last paper, "Oh! How appropriate!: Compliments and politeness"(pp. 391-430), Maria Sifianou, on the basis of an extensive corpus ofover 450 compliment exchanges , claims that compliments are not asformulaic in Greek as has been shown to the case with other languages.Sifianou argues that compliments are interpreted as giving gifts andfunction as that of offers and that women both pay and receivesignificantly more compliments than men. The author also calls for adistinction between routine and non-routine or genuine compliments.

DISCUSSIONThe editors of the present volume must be credited with the insightsshown in presenting to us readers empirical studies of linguisticpoliteness in Greece and Turkey by recurring to the approaches ofethnography, speech acts, conversational analysis and discoursecompletion tests (cf. p. xiii). All the chapters, arranged in pairs asmentioned earlier in the review, are empirically oriented, most ofwhich hold much water. Many of the papers are couched within theframework of Brown and Levinson's politeness model, which has beenproved "the most influential and comprehensive so far" (p. 7). All thecontributions in this volume help to show what is peculiar inpoliteness phenomena in these two countries. I am, apart from otherthings, deeply impressed with exhaustive notes at the end of somepapers (Hirschon, Makri-Tsilipakou, Pavlidou, Ruth & Dogan, Sifianou,and Zeyrek), which is helpful for both clarification of some relevantpoints and further researching. Of course, we should not forget some ofthe universals of various cultures at the same time of talking aboutpeculiarities of each. In actual fact, smooth communication is theultimate point in accounting for the ever-increasing zest in politenessstudies, especially in this age of cultural globalization followingeconomic globalization (cf. Xie in preparation a). And it is noexaggeration to predict that, where there is communication, there ispoliteness studies. And the best policy, in my view, would be to agreeto disagree. After all, we human beings are all members of a largefamily separated by the fallen Babel. This volume is well-edited interms of both content and style. In addition, it has very few typos.This volume would surely be embraced by any reader interested inlanguage use in general and in politeness studies in particular, be itnative speaker of Greek or Turkish or not. I recommend it withoutreservation and with admiration.

ABOUT THE REVIEWERChaoqun Xie is a lecturer with Foreign Languages Institute, FujianTeachers University in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China. His main areasof research interests include cognitive linguistics, pragmatics,translation and communication. He is particularly interested inrelevance theory and politeness theory from the cognitive-pragmaticperspective and is seeking cooperation with researchers of the sameinterest.